The professional social media network, LinkedIn announced recently that it is adding a range of new titles, including ‘stay-at-home mom’ to enable full-time parents to provide better and more appropriate descriptions of their time away from the paid labour force.
It is also retracting its previous requirement that any resume entry — for instance, “stay-at-home dad” —must be linked to a particular company or employer.
“I wholeheartedly agree that we need to normalize employment gaps on the profile to help reframe hiring conversations,” Bef Ayenew, director of engineering at LinkedIn, told Fortune.
Microsoft-owned LinkedIn also intends to bring in many new features in the coming months. For example, it will bring in new flexibility and language to users who have stopped working for a period of time or taken a sabbatical from paid work. One planned change will allow people to create separate resume sections for employment gaps and choose one of 10 different types of hiatus, including “parental leave,” “family care leave,” or “sabbatical.”
This move comes at a time when many parents, particularly women, have left the workforce during the coronavirus pandemic to provide care for their children. According to statistics, in the United States, more than 2.3 million women have left the labour force since the beginning of the pandemic in February 2020.
In the near future, LinkedIn will also introduce a dedicated, formal field for LinkedIn users to add their gender pronouns to their profiles to promote inclusivity and diversity.
“70 percent of job seekers believe it’s important that recruiters and hiring managers know their gender pronouns, and 72 percent of hiring managers agree and believe it shows respect,” the platform said in the post.
Aren’t these some great initiatives by LinkedIn? Let us know your views in the comments section below.
